


not all you want, some that you need

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired By Tumblr, Jyn versus the heavy bag, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Punching, Self-Harm, Sparring, Tumblr Prompt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, predictably Jyn loses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 09:57:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10919472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Pain is just about the only release that Jyn knows right now from the immense crushing pain of her grief and of her loss.She thinks she's alone with the pain in her body and in her mind, but fortunately she's truly not alone.





	not all you want, some that you need

She hears the creaking in her own joints, in her own fingers, when she clenches her fists: tight and tight, and it’d be a toss-up as to where she’d begin bleeding first. The knuckles, where her finger bones are threatening to slice through the fragile skin? The palms, where her nails are too short and too gnawed-down and too sharp to bite? 

Her fists are wrapped in layers of bandages and the absurd ballooning leather and padding of her gloves, and she sees the red leather turn even redder and darker, in her mind’s eye: the blood in her veins seeping into the artificial material, and it’s too much, there’s too much in her head, too many voices and that inescapable inexorable insidious return, the solemn voices chanting out the mourning songs, and she grinds her teeth together.

Plants her feet, steadying on the shaking ground. 

Winds up, tension singing high and false in her muscles and in her sinews, thorns bristling under her skin, and then she’s screaming and she’s surging forward, unstoppable, the rage crackling in a tight band around her skull, just above her eyebrows, and then the impact comes when she’s not looking for it or expecting it, impact that jars her back into normal space and time and the place where people have no idea why she’s still dressed in bits and pieces of her mourning blacks and she’s also wearing padding and gloves:

She opens her eyes.

The heavy bag is spinning ponderously to a stop before her, throwing swaying shadows onto the floor.

Not a dent in it as far as she can see.

And she wants to make a dent in it. She wants to tear it to bits. It wears not a face but what she thinks of as a taunt: she imagines the face of the man who killed her father, who got clean away, and she punches the bag again. 

Her blood on her skin beneath the obscuring red leather, and that man’s blood on his face, spreading and spreading on the blank faceless anonymity of the heavy bag.

Punch. Punch. Punch. She draws a panicking breath. Punch. Punch. The momentum builds in her hips, her knees, her ankles, and she leaps back almost without thinking of her form, and almost without thinking of the brick-and-mortar walls surrounding her and the bag on two sides, and she lets the force of her next punches, striking air and nothing else, turn her around in spiraling circles. Her muscles working, flex and clench, adductor and abductor, and the impact of her bare foot on the bag smashes through every screaming nerve in her body --

Salt on her mouth, again, salt in the corners of her lips, and she may never stop weeping, never, never --

She sinks to her knees. Covers her face with her hands -- no, not with her hands. Her gloves. 

Her own hot tears overtaking her again.

She sobs, and she clenches her mouth around the cry, around her desperation and her mother’s: and no, not even here, not ever here. She can’t cry for her father here. 

Here, in this darkened gym, the one thing her father’s left to her, because he had been a man of his books and his inkstained pens and his notebooks covered in calculations and figures and doodles, but he had also inherited a gym from his mother and that was how this became the gym with a small library tucked into one of the side rooms.

Development of the mind. Development of the body, sometimes both at the same time. Some of the books have to do with workouts and forms, and some of the books are battered and old and covered many times over with squiggling clashing chickenscratch writing, theorems built on first principles, numbers and figures holding the world together.

Nothing in this place is a comfort, not here or not now.

Empty this place like Jyn’s heart is empty.

Even the rooms are mostly blank space; she’s the only one rattling around from one bedroom to another. From the tiny kitchen to the even tinier balcony with its potted plants and the carefully curated collection of rocks, brilliant mineral colors catching the sunlight and moonlight and rain and snow, and refracting those things, reflecting them back into the world.

Rocks belonging to her mother: who is even now away on another excavation. Burying her grief in the search for ancient treasures, in the finding of artifacts.

And Jyn envies her mother that relief.

Scant relief, anyway, as the morning’s anguished phone calls had proved.

Jyn has to stay and mind the gym. 

Has to stay and teach: there are many women and young ones in this part of the city who need to know how to defend themselves, who want to learn from her. Fountain pens in their neat cases in her backpack, and long lengths of linen wound around her forearms for when she’s teaching, for when she’s training.

Scant relief, as she pushes herself back to her feet and throws herself at the heavy bag once again.

The air grows stale around her. Her sweat soaking into her black clothes. Her tears drying stiff on her cheeks, on her throat, on her gloves. She kicks and she punches and she finally lets the words fall from her lips, violent swearing, all the languages she’s picked up from her mother and from her father, all the oaths she hears from the men and women who hone their bodies into fine weapons here.

Until finally she throws the punch that sends her reeling, that pushes her completely off-balance and the thud of her face against the heavy bag throws wild fiery sparks of pain against the backs of her eyelids. Fortunate that she’d remembered to close her eyes as she begins to succumb to the inevitable tug of remorseless gravity, that flings her down to the mats that are dented with the shapes of her own feet.

Down on her face, she cries, and the sobs fill up the stale air, the shadows of the gym, closed for the night --

A sharp sound.

Footsteps, approaching.

“Fuck! _No!_ ” Jyn cries. “Fucking go away!”

The footsteps keep coming and she swears again, begins to rise, to push herself to her feet. Blind with her sorrow and her rage and the very real pain that still caroms within her skin, sharp edges every way she turns -- 

“Jyn.”

One word.

That one voice.

“Fuck,” she says, in response.

She doesn’t fight it when hands turn her over. She lets herself curl up. Her body knows how to protect that which is physically fragile in her: her gut and her heart and her eyes.

Her mind can’t protect itself from the thoughts that it generates.

Soothing sounds, as she’s gathered into a pair of warm arms, as she’s situated against a warm chest. 

A heart beats beneath her ear: not hers, but maybe one that she knows almost as well.

In turn she wraps her battered self around the man who’s holding her.

“I should have known I’d find you here.” Cassian. This is Cassian. He still smells of the world outside. Smoke and hot lights, dust bunnies in the corners, designer perfume and makeup. He smells of the darkroom, of chemicals and film spools exposed to safe lights, to fixer and developer and stop bath. “I tried to come back as soon as I could.”

Instead of answering, she presses her forehead and her nose and her mouth into his clothes. 

She whimpers when one of his arms around her unwinds -- but then she can feel his hand curving around the back of her head, holding her.

“Jyn,” he says, again, and now she can hear the worry in his voice.

She doesn’t like it when he’s worried.

“I can’t -- I can’t stop,” she manages to say around her hiccups and her tears and her snot.

“Not asking you to. I know you’re grieving. I know you’re not all right. Just.”

He stops and she feels him draw a breath, as shaky as her own, and maybe also starting to get a little damp around the edges.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“No. Don’t be sorry. Never that. I just wish I could do something for your pain. I wish I could take some of it away from you.”

She hiccups, again.

Uncurls.

There is enough light to see him by: to see the shadows of him, the shape of his face and the lines in his skin.

Silver lines threading into his hair.

“Help me get these off,” she says, holding her gloves up to him.

The smell of copper and rust only gets stronger as her hands are revealed. Red-brown smudges on her knuckles, spreading to the backs of her hands.

“Oh,” he murmurs over her skin, whispering warmth, one word.

She pulls her hand back.

“No, don’t,” he says.

And she watches him reclaim her hand. Unwrap it from the bandages.

He hisses with her when the material pulls away from the red-edged lines. “If I didn’t know anything about first aid,” he murmurs, “I’d be taking you to the ER right now.”

But all he does is kiss around the edges of her wounds, kiss her inflamed skin, and he is warmer than the pain and warmer than the grief, and she lets herself cling to him, to his gentle calloused hands.

When he kisses her forehead she lets the new tears fall. “You are so good to me.”

Maybe his smile shakes a little around the edges. “I should say the same of you. You didn’t need to be kind to the idiot who wandered into your gym.”

She laughs, and is surprised that she can laugh, with salt still rough on her lips. “You did look like an idiot. Stupid vest. Stupid hair.”

Cassian laughs, and tries to hide his laugh in the crook of her elbow, and mostly fails. “Thanks for beating some sense into me. I might even mean that literally.”

“You can throw a punch,” she admits. “Kicking, on the other hand -- ”

He laughs some more. Ends that laugh with a lingering kiss to the corner of her eye. “Maybe we’re a little bit more even, when we spar.”

“Sometimes,” she says. 

She lets herself be coaxed into sitting up, because he drapes himself against her back, because he rubs his cheek against hers. 

Because he says, pleading, “Let it go. Just for now. Let it go.”

“Hurts too much,” she says. 

But the tears don’t fall, not this time, and the heavy desperate clench around her heart eases, just a little.

She can lean on him.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Prompt Thirteen: "desperation" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](https://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr. 
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](https://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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